Unpacking Nationality: Feminist Geopolitics and the Politics of Belonging

In a world increasingly polarised by ongoing conflicts and rivalries, “geopolitics” has emerged as a dominant buzzword in global debates, discussions, and analyses. In Nepal, a country that is strategically situated between the regional and global powers of China and India, politicians, leaders, and analysts often attribute major political developments to geopolitical factors. While such an attribution may be justified at times, the use of geopolitics as an only analytical framework fails to fully capture the complexities of socio-political phenomena. Specifically, it overlooks key actors, issues, and dynamics that shape these events or bear their consequences. This article explores one such overlooked issue—nationality and citizenship—and argues that feminist geopolitics offers a critical alternative theoretical framework. Drawing from Nepal’s context, it highlights how feminist geopolitics can address the limitations of traditional geopolitics and provide for a more nuanced, just, and comprehensive understanding of world affairs.

Understanding Feminist Geopolitics

For a long time, the study of International Relations has been dominated by theories and analyses that place state’s security at the centre of the debates. The most prominent of these are the realist thinkers, who see the world as an anarchic system of self-help, where states’ behaviours are driven by their quest for survival. This approach of framing the state as the referent object overlooks the security of individuals, particularly those from marginalised and oppressed groups. Worse still, at times states and governments are the perpetrators of harm against certain groups and individuals. Analysing world affairs from a statist lens allows such states to escape scrutiny of their actions. Consequently, issues such as ethnic cleansing, targeted execution, intra-state conflicts, and gender-based violence can be relegated to secondary status, or even rendered irrelevant in geopolitical analysis.

This dominant view was challenged in the 1990s when critical security scholars asked a more pertinent question: “security for whom?” If the state’s security was paramount, what about the security of individuals who make up the state? In the post-Cold War period, Human Security emerged as a concept, which was formalised in a 1994 UNDP report. It sought to rethink security by shifting the focus away from the state and instead situating individuals as the referent object. In the world order (and the UN system) that gave primacy to states, this was a welcome shift because the states and dictators around the world could no longer use state sovereignty as an excuse to commit heinous crimes on individuals and groups within their territory. Although legally non-binding, this new approach paved the path for a more nuanced understanding and interpretation of global affairs and international relations.

Feminist geopolitics emerged from this critical juncture in the early 2000s as an approach to understanding and interpreting global political landscapes and practices. It challenges the traditional state-centric approach, instead focusing on the aspects of security that are far more complex and diverse than that of the nation-state, as outlined by Jennifer Hyndman. This critical approach also challenges the private/public divide of traditional approaches, which often neglect crucial socio-cultural power relations related to gender, and offers “a more accountable, embodied, and responsive notion of geopolitics.”

Nationality and Geopolitics: A Feminist Lens

Geopolitics intersects with gender and nationality in significant ways, but these intersections have received little attention in scholarly debates and mainstream discourse. Although geopolitics dominates the discussions on regional and global politics, many of these manoeuvres are underpinned by some form of nationalism—one of the most widely studied concepts in Political Science. The literature offers diverse interpretations and definitions of nation, nationality, and citizenship. From the Aristotelian understanding of citizenship as ‘a right of active participation in governance’ to Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘a membership in an imagined political community,’ the meaning and scope of citizenship have expanded significantly over time. In today’s world, this membership offers an individual not just the civil, political, and social rights, as outlined by T.H. Marshall, but also an agency for economic participation and mobility. Only with an equal realisation of all these rights does an individual feel a true sense of belonging in any political community. Unfortunately, gender remains one of the most common demographic factors to experience unequal treatment in matters of nationality and citizenship—Nepal being a case in point.

Nepal’s Gender Discriminatory Citizenship Laws

Although Nepal’s citizenship laws have seen gradual liberalisation over the decades, certain aspects continue to be discriminatory against women. The Constitution of Nepal 2015 is often claimed as one of the most progressive in the region, yet it still contains gender-discriminatory provisions that essentially relegate women to second-class citizens. For instance, Article 11.2 allows citizenship by descent to anyone “whose father or mother was a citizen of Nepal at his or her birth.” However, Articles 11.5 and 11.7 impose conditions on Nepali women’s ability to confer citizenship to their children based on their spouses’ citizenship status—whether the spouse is Nepali, foreign, or untraceable.

If the father is a Nepali citizen, the individual can obtain citizenship by descent. If the father is a foreigner, the individual is eligible only for naturalised citizenship, a far more complicated and restrictive process. In cases where the father is untraceable, the mother must prove that the individual was born and has a domicile in Nepal. Crucially, none of these burdensome conditions apply to individuals born to Nepali fathers. Another discriminatory provision in the 2015 Constitution is the gender-based discrepancy in a citizen’s ability to provide naturalised citizenship to their spouse: Nepali women are denied the right to confer naturalised citizenship to their foreign spouses, a right freely available to their male counterparts.

Unsurprisingly, these exclusionary provisions were reproduced in the Nepal Citizenship (First Amendment) Act 2023, which governs the current citizenship distribution framework. Under this Act, a Nepali woman must meet strict conditions to grant citizenship to her child in her name alone. In addition to proving that her child was born and resides in Nepal, she must declare that the father’s identity is unknown. If the previously unidentified father establishes his biological paternity later, the mother risks legal penalties, including imprisonment, fines, or both. Furthermore, the Act upholds the gendered constitutional provision barring Nepali women from granting naturalisation rights to their foreign spouses.

These discriminatory citizenship provisions not only perpetuate patriarchal structures but also implicitly question women’s loyalty to the state. By favouring male citizens, the Nepali state strips its women citizens of equal citizenship and a genuine sense of belonging, rendering their status contingent on their relationships with Nepali men—whether fathers or spouses. The impact of these provisions is compounded when gender intersects with other factors such as ethnicity, caste, and class. For instance, a woman from a marginalised Madheshi Dalit community faces compounded barriers—not only in the citizenship acquisition process but also in the realisation of her rights. Consequently, unequal citizenship perpetuates unequal power dynamics at the societal level, where women’s rights, issues, and concerns are deemed secondary and insignificant, let alone featured in geopolitical discourse.

The Politics of Belonging: A Feminist Critique

Nepal’s citizenship laws enforce a narrow and exclusionary definition of belonging, which prioritises male bloodline and national security concerns over human rights and gender justice. While women bear the brunt of this discrimination, the consequences extend further. Concerns over national security, territorial integrity, and sovereignty have historically reinforced a hill-centric notion of Nepali national identity, marginalising other ethnic groups, such as the Madheshi, from enjoying an equal sense of belonging and citizenship. Despite gradual liberalisation, the process of obtaining citizenship continues to prove far more challenging for the Madheshi and other minority and marginalised groups.

Due to Nepal’s open border with India and cross-border socio-cultural ties, Madheshi citizenship applicants are often unfairly perceived as potential Indian settlers illegally trying to obtain Nepali citizenship. This places an additional burden of proof on Madheshi applicants to demonstrate their Nepali identity and loyalty to the state—just because their identity does not align with the widely accepted notion of Nepaliness. Nepali political and bureaucratic elites frequently securitise citizenship, framing it as a safeguard against supposed Indian infiltration. This securitisation disproportionately affects the borderland populations, predominantly Madheshi, deepening their marginalisation.  

The securitisation of citizenship also perpetuates systemic patriarchy. By relegating women to second-class citizens under the guise of national security, the state institutionalises structural discrimination, creating conditions for gender-based violence and societal inequality. For instance, a rape survivor must endure humiliation and unnecessary questioning, and follow a tedious process to grant her child Nepali citizenship in her name alone. A Nepali woman politician married to a foreign man faces scrutiny and harassment. A landless Madheshi Dalit woman with a deceased husband may never overcome the bureaucratic and financial obstacles needed to secure Nepali citizenship for her children.

However, the traditional state-centric approaches of geopolitics overlook these internal factors, treating issues of nationality and belonging as unimportant or irrelevant. By prioritising sovereignty over social justice and human rights, such approaches obscure issues like gender discrimination and minority marginalisation. The focus on state security perpetuates these injustices by ignoring the socio-economic realities and patriarchal structures embedded in laws like Nepali’s citizenship provisions. By failing to incorporate these socio-economic realities, political context, and patriarchal underpinnings, the traditional approach of geopolitical analysis perpetuates the marginalisation of women and minorities.

Feminist Geopolitics: Way Forward

In contrast to the traditional approaches, feminist geopolitics prioritises the lived realities of individuals, existing power structures, and critical intersectionalities. In the context of Nepal’s discriminatory citizenship laws, the feminist geopolitics approach would not only consider but also critically assess the causes, consequences, and implications of such exclusionary provisions. It examines how power structures at the familial, societal, and state levels shape or reinforce these exclusions. Employing feminist geopolitics also helps identify the complex intersectionalities of gender, ethnicity, caste, and class, offering a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of Nepal’s citizenship provisions and the discrimination they perpetuate.

By focusing on finer and more nuanced issues, such as gender, nationality, and citizenship, feminist geopolitics offers a valuable tool to develop a more accountable, embodied, and responsive approach to geopolitics. As highlighted above, instead of focusing on abstract concepts of sovereignty and national security, this approach emphasises who are actually affected by these concepts and how. By doing so, it presents a more comprehensive picture of the socio-political dynamics and power structures that shape geopolitics at both regional or global levels. Therefore, it is essential to mainstream feminist geopolitics as a more relevant and effective theoretical framework in geopolitical analyses.

The first step in that direction is to clearly define this framework and discuss its relevance. Highlighting the need to shift the focus from state security to individual security also requires the identification and critical assessment of new, finer parameters that shape power dynamics and contribute to broader political trends. Only by integrating these concepts into our analyses can we paint a more comprehensive, equitable, and inclusive picture of the geopolitical landscape. This can be achieved through the collaborative efforts of scholars, thinkers, political organisations, and state apparatuses.

The opinions and statements of the guest authors do not necessarily reflect the opinion and position of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.